Post-cloning of drive, why is bootup so slow?

[packman 0]

I've just done a clone of my main hard drive, using Ghost 2003. It appears to be successful, in that I've tested the destination drive, to see if it boots. But the bootup, at one particular point, is extremely slow, taking about FIVE times as long as on the original drive. Has anyone who's used Ghost ever encountered this and, if so, can you explain the cause and possibly give a remedy?

 

The operating system is Win2K and the slowness occurs in the very first screen of the booting up into Windows, namely the one where it says "Starting Up .....Windows 2000 Professional". It's the screen where you see the blue progress bar. Subsequent phases of the bootup suffer no slowness.

 

I'm wondering if perhaps I still haven't done the cloning properly. A number of factors applied during the cloning:-

 

1)In PC-DOS, I ignored Options (I think one option gets set by default).

 

2)I cloned with the destination drive on the Primary SLAVE channel. Subsequent testing of that drive, on its own of course, was also done on that SLAVE channel.

 

3)As the destination drive started to boot into Windows, my System BIOS generated a boot sector alarm and required me to acknowledge a change there.It didn't say what the change would be, though.

 

4)Prior to cloning, I'd added a 'write signature' to the destination drive, which was a brand new drive, identical in every way to the original. This is a Microsoft requirement and programs in Windows won't recognise drives until the signature has been applied. But presumably, this got overwritten during the cloning?

 

5) When the destination finished booting into Windows, Windows gave a message saying that not all hardware had yet been installed and that I should restart the PC for that to happen. I did that. Why should it have needed this, though?

 

6)The cloning overwrote existing partitions on the destination, creating some unallocated space where none existed before (this was required by me).

 

7) Presumably, other changes got made to the MBR?

 

So, has anyone any idea as to why the bootup spends so long now in that particular screen I've mentioned? It's a wait of some 30 secs - 1 minute. Does the MBR, or the partition tables, now not reflect the true layout of files on the destination drive?

 

 

[American Zombie 0]

Maybe try clone again?

[packman 0]

I've found the answer! When I switched the destination (with the cloned contents in it) to the Primary MASTER IDE connection, it booted at normal rate. There's clearly something about Windows that means that if you run a drive on the Primary SLAVE channel that was, in effect, previously on the Primary MASTER, it'll spend much more time booting up.

 

As for the hardware error message I got when the destination drive first booted to the Desktop, this is a valid and genuine message. It's caused by a disparity that Windows finds between the serial no. and firmware of the respective drives. Once the PC is restarted, this message never appears again.

 

And as for the 'write signature', I doubt whether that's necessary when you're cloning a drive, as the cloning is done completely in PC-DOS.